Jonathan Goldman has gone deep into the mystic and beyond for 2012's Cosmic Hum. Always an innovator in the use of Tibetan bowls and layers of pulsing synth pads to facilitate healing and meditation, Goldman goes way back to the beginning on Cosmic Hum to make an album so ingeniously basic it strips even the “om” down to the humming “m.” For some of us, the peace we feel while lying on an acupuncture table or trying to meditate at home can be interrupted when the wrong music comes on and distracts us from our focus. Even the change from one track to the other can distract our flow.

For over an hour the hum of hundreds of combined voices breathe in unison so that the humming flows without a pause. With no easily discernible melody, the warm rush of the album is nonetheless hypnotic, with a steady long hum of the "om" accented with Tibetan bowls, or stretched vocal echoes. As Goldman writes of the latter technique (in the album's 12-page liner note booklet): "I’ve done this effect before to sometimes enrich the technique of different recordings and help color the sound. What normally happens is that the sound is simply doubled—going up an octave and creating a richer timbre or texture of sound." Instead he accidentally created "the sound of a female choir toning a hauntingly beautiful melody—almost as though an angelic choir were humming along in an ancient, primordial song." Goldman also creates a Doppler effect, gradually changing keys as the humming slowly approaches and gradually recedes from the listener, instilling a profound feeling of planetary revolution as the listener's mind reaches the place of pure stillness through which one becomes aware of the movement of the planet below our meditation cushions.

Cosmic Hum also contains deep delta binaural wave frequencies, so it is best experienced with headphones. Listen deeply and after a while it's possible to discern new melodic shapes and timbres in the rush. Prior to Cosmic Hum we had only the white noise static on our radios to remind us of that true music of the spheres, so beyond our comprehension that it appears as a fuzzy abstraction of white noise. Jonathan Goldman has just made that noise into something beautiful, a permanent bridge between the human voice and the rushing silence of the universe.